Even as I key in these words, there’s a raging aandhi outside, unsettling everything that’s coming in its way. Unleashing its fury on tall trees and lonesome lamp-posts — even human beings who, in any other situation, could have been bragging about how they’re capable of this — and that the aandhi spares no one.
You could call it a storm. But somehow, ‘aandhi-toofan’ is more apt, immediately conveying the very mood, the state of affairs, the very state of nature in its unbridled form. Say ‘aandhi toofan’ and you’re somehow connected to the upheavals taking place all around us.
Strangely, this entire week, aandhis have been around in Delhi, bringing down the heat, but uprooting, unsettling and damaging so much at the same time.
Then there is the additional menace that it poses to all those people susceptible to falling ill and those with breathing difficulties. Also, you could equip yourself with a hundred brooms and dusters and go hopping around — and hopping mad — cleaning your house, but that dust just smirks at you and spreads itself out comfortably all around. And just when you feel that you’ve somewhat settled the devil, there’s another aandhi blowing its head off, howling as if partly upset and partly with a mission to get on your nerves.
The wildness of these aandhis strikes the heart of every poet. To talk even about the metaphorical storms that hit us, those emotional aandhis and toofans, it’s only a poet who’ll have the courage to take them on.
{{/usCountry}}The wildness of these aandhis strikes the heart of every poet. To talk even about the metaphorical storms that hit us, those emotional aandhis and toofans, it’s only a poet who’ll have the courage to take them on.
{{/usCountry}}But then, there’s always a strange, unnaturally quiet that emerges after an aandhi. This is when some sort of a sukoon — peace — descends, after the death of each storm.